Quality Attributes

May 18, 2017

What are Quality Attributes?

In terms of software, quality is defined as the degree of measure that defines its implicit and explicit requirements. This may be further defined as a well-documented and defined aspects which needs to be ensured by the testing team in order to meet the expectations of users. Quality attributes are the most fundamental metrics which are highly responsible to ensure quality of an application.

Here, we are going to explored the list of quality attributes which are responsible to acknowledge end-to-end functioning of the application. Below mentioned points are the key for determining the application’s success.

Reliability: It ensures whether the product is capable enough to work under certain conditions and produces effective results as expected. It can be easily evaluated while working for any project under different working environments and conditions.

Usability: It is defined as the ease in using the software or application. A software product must be user-friendly and easily operable. Further, it completely depends upon the design of interface, clarity of data, simplicity of user interactions and manuals to handle an application. It should ensure these following points:

The system must be convenient for input preparation, operation, and interpretation of output.

The system must provide consistent user interface standards.

The should be easy for new users to learn and know about how to use.

Maintainability: Multiple versions of the application should be easily maintained in order to ensure maintainability. For development purposes, it is necessary to add or delete code into the existing system for better maintenance.

Correctness: Software application must be correct mainly in terms of functionality, correctness in calculations and accurate navigation. This means that the application needs to be functionally fulfilled all the essential requirements.

Portability: At the time of porting the application, there should be no cost related and technical issues, i.e. the application shouldn’t be affected during porting.

Efficiency: This is one of the most crucial attributes of quality. It can be measured in time required to complete the task given to the application or the system. There are some components which can be affected such as processor, disk space and memory. Meanwhile, system uses memory to complete a certain task which eventually decreases the performance hence efficiency will fail.

Security: To ensure security factors it is mandatory to first ensure the integrity measures which include unauthorized access, information loss, virus and privacy of data within system.

Testability: Testability ensures that system shouldn’t face any kind of trouble to find bugs or errors at the time of testing. It is quite effective if testing module is divided in different forms.

Flexibility: The application should be flexible enough to modify things within the module; there must be appropriate user-interface with third-party components to make changes.

Interoperability: Interoperability is the ability of exchanging data or services from one system to another. Different types of modules should work on divergent platforms with different databases and protocols.

Reusability: Reuse of work is always end-up with efficient cost and save time for development purpose. Different types of code libraries should be very generic to easily compatible with disparate modules across the application.

Extensibility: It allows significant modifications at the needed locations in the application without any side effects. The extensibility is mainly depends upon the structuredness of the system, possibilities, readability of code, and availability of program documentation.